PICTURE PERFECT: Carol Alt has plenty of room to enjoy looking at a watercolor portrait of herself in this sprawling TriBeCa condo. (Elizabeth Lippman)

Alt’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition cover.

A Lanvin necklace Alexei bought her (above) — “What I like about it is that this is how he sees me.” (Elizabeth Lippman)

Model/actress Carol Alt admits she was mystified when she first heard that Robert De Niro had settled in TriBeCa: “I had no idea where that was,” she says. “I remember asking: ‘Doesn’t he make a lot of money doing movies? Can’t he afford to live in Manhattan?’ ”

She found out that TriBeCa was indeed part of Manhattan when, in 2000, she decided to give up her Los Angeles home and move to New York, buying a condo, sight unseen, at an under-construction building in the posh neighborhood.

She closed on Nov. 1, 2001 — less than two months after 9/11. As other people were moving out of TriBeCa, Alt was moving in.

The 3,200-plus-square-foot pad Alt bought for $2 million features four bedrooms (which she reconfigured into two big bedrooms and one enormous office), four bathrooms, a 50-by-30-foot living room with 13 1/2-foot ceilings, a dining room, a spacious kitchen and a workout area.

What were the attractions? “It was very important to me to have a working fireplace,” Alt says. “My father was a fireman and just the smell — everything — reminds me of him. And I love the big windows, the high ceilings and all the space.

“I call this apartment my office. We [Alt and her significant other, Alexei Yashin, the general manager of the Russian national woman’s hockey team] have a home in Old Westbury. I stay there when he’s in town, but when he’s away I stay here.

“Sometimes I call Alexei my boyfriend, sometimes I call him my husband. We’ve been together for 14 years, but I would never get married again. I treat Alexei like my husband. I don’t go out with other people, and I assume neither does he.”

The decorating is mostly Alt’s handiwork: “It’s my style,” she says, “but [Alexei] did give me the rugs as gifts, and he also gave me the dining-room table and matching chairs as a housewarming gift. That’s more his taste than mine, but it is spectacular-looking.”

She picked out the brown leather armchair that she had sent from Los Angeles, a corner breakfront filled with dishes (the dishes were also gifts from Alexei) and a living room couch that she modeled after one she saw at Russell Simmons’ downtown apartment.

“He had a big room with a couch like this,” Alt says, “and I thought it was gorgeous. So I had one made. This is a huge room, and I needed something big.”

A marble-topped table that friends sent from Italy for a housewarming gift also resides in the living room. “They shipped this beautiful thing,” Alt says, “and the marble actually broke. But this was so soon after 9/11 that I didn’t have it repaired. It just seemed like part of life.”

As for Alt’s life, she’s preparing for the debut of “A Healthy You and Carol Alt” on Fox News.

“It starts on Sept. 7, and it’s a half-hour Saturday afternoon show,” she says. “They’ve offered me an opportunity and every day I pray I’m worthy of it.”

Still stunning at 52, Alt — who’s been on the cover of more than 500 magazines, including the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue — will be talking about health, beauty and lifestyle issues. “I’m going to position myself as the person — like the viewers — who has questions,” she says. “I’m planning on having experts on the show and asking the questions the viewers would ask.

“And I will talk about my raw food diet. People think it’s just raw carrots. I eat carrots, and I drink carrot juice. But I also eat ice cream, granola, cakes. I just know the right places to buy the right things. That’s why I wrote my books.”

Those three books on raw foods include her latest, “Easy, Sexy, Raw.” “It’s the most up-to-date one. It tells you where to get everything,” she says.

Alt mainly works out of the apartment, which is lined with wall-to-wall, custom-made bookcases that house her scrapbooks and shelves of DVDs of movies in which she’s acted. And the walls and counters are brimming with photos by famous photographers and fans’ drawings of her.

“It’s all here because this is where I meet people and this is the best home-court advantage I could have,” she says. “The whole point of this place is that when people come here for a meeting they see who I am. And it reminds me of what I’ve done. In this day and age, it’s sometimes hard to remember.

“There are so many people doing better or greater things. So I need to feel confident when people come here. And this apartment is where I get all my confidence from.”

Carol Alt’s

favorite things

* A watercolor of her by famed fashion illustrator Joe Eula. “He asked me to pose for him for an illustration. I said, on one condition: ‘You make one for you and one for me.’ ”

* The walk-in closet her brother built for her as a housewarming gift. He also made a boot closet and a closet for luggage.

* The dining room table and chairs that Alexei gave her as a housewarming gift

* The fireplace

* Her awards — among them: European awards for acting, Woman of the Year from the Girls’ Club of America for her charity work and CFDA’s Model of the Year.

* Her posters — “It was the first time I stepped out of modeling and did something different.”

* The marble-topped table friends sent from Italy

* Her desk — “It’s been with me for 32 years.”

* The leather armchair

* A Lanvin necklace Alexei bought her — “What I like about it is that this is how he sees me.”